Here we are. It's the end of another year. It's hard to believe that we're wrapping up

our sixth season of Wild Ideas Worth Living. 2022 was a great year for the show. We interviewed

50 incredible guests this year and I was blown away by the diversity of people I spoke

with. It was a big year for me personally too. I spent a month doing an artist residency

in Costa Rica to work on a writing project that will come out next year. You can probably

guess what it is but I promise to tell you more about it soon. I'm Shelby Stanger and this

is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI co-op studios production.

Our guest this year reminded us of some important lessons, like the fact that age is just

a number that being present outside can be extremely cathartic and that any of us can

start an adventure today. But one of my favorite lessons was from author Diana Helmeth. She

told me that the outdoors is a great place for cultivating humor and pro-tip, leggings

can make for great hiking pants, as long as there aren't any giant mosquitoes. Diana

wrote the book How to Suffer Outside and she is a refreshingly relatable take on adventuring

outdoors.

I don't know if you felt this, if you're having a really bad day and you're just like,

man, everybody on the planet sucks, I'm going to go talk to the trees, you know, and the

trees hilariously are like, lol, okay, like you can come but we're not going to be nice

by the way. That's my favorite part about nature is that she doesn't love you and accept

you for who you are. She just doesn't give a shit about you so you're forced to give

a shit about yourself.

For me, Diana's episode was one of the funniest we recorded. We laughed a lot during that interview.

On top of sharing her hilarious but practical tips, Diana also talked about how going outside

...